Ole Miss’ Lessons in Southern Symbolism

It’s hard to conceive of an institution with an image more entwined with Southern history and tradition than the tree-shaded campus of the University of Mississippi.

During the Civil War, when Ole Miss was all male, its entire student body withdrew to enlist in the Confederate army. “Dixie” and the Confederate battle flag still are mainstays at sporting events, and Colonel Reb--a whiskered caricature of a plantation owner--is the school mascot.

Even the nickname is a throwback. “Ole Miss” supposedly is how slaves used to refer to plantation mistresses.

About all this, Chancellor Robert C. Khayat is having second thoughts. Fearing that the school’s Old South image has become a shackle, he has set in motion a process that he hopes will change that image and improve the school’s academic reputation.

But, boy howdy, from the ruckus he stirred up, you’d think he slapped somebody’s momma and swore at Colonel Reb.

Across the South, Confederate symbols are under siege. Black Southerners, and a growing number of whites, are increasingly rising up to oppose the enshrinement of symbols that many consider racist. But the white majority, which views the effort as an assault on Southern history, is standing firm. The result is a culture war with no sign of abatement.

What sets the battle of Ole Miss apart is that the Old South symbols are so inextricably bound with school identity and tradition. Here, the debate isn’t over what banner flies over a distant state capitol--it’s over school spirit.

Treading gingerly, Khayat merely has posed a question: If all of the rebel symbolism and its attendant baggage has hurt the campus by obscuring the school’s virtues, inhibiting academic progress and scaring away black student athletes, then isn’t it maybe time some of the symbols are retired?

But when word got out that he had enlisted a public relations firm to study how people perceive the school, angry white students held rallies in defense of heritage and tradition. Newspapers were flooded with letters. “My blood is boiling over . . . “ declared one writer to the Jackson Clarion-Ledger. “Robert Khayat is a scalawag and should immediately be replaced! . . . [He] has betrayed Ole Miss, Mississippi and the South!”

For the most part, the issue has been debated with restraint--courtesy being a valued if often forgotten Southern trait--but violence broke out in March when a group of African American students got into an altercation at the Rebel Barn, a drive-through store near campus that sells beer, barbecue and rebel flags. On the same evening that attorney Johnnie Cochran spoke here and praised Khayat for opening up debate about Southern symbolism, students rampaged through the store, ripping up every flag in sight.

William Faulkner, who lived in Oxford until his death in 1962, once said that in the South the past is not dead; it’s not even past. Perhaps nothing illustrates the truth of his observation better than the struggle at Ole Miss, and other places in the South, over the symbols that define the region’s history.

Were the Confederates dead patriots or traitors? Does the rebel flag symbolize honor or white supremacy? Should a state--or a state university--sanction symbols that honor a past that a sizable portion of the population considers painful?

“We have a wonderful history,” said Khayat, a law professor and Ole Miss graduate who became chancellor in 1995. He acknowledges “painful events” in the school’s past--such as the massive and deadly 1962 riot that erupted when a black student tried to enroll--but said it is unfair for the school to be constantly seen in that light.

“I’m very tired of being imprisoned and categorized and viewed by the world in the past tense instead of in the present or the future,” he said. “I don’t think that’s fair.”

A former star football player who in 1960 was elected Colonel Reb--an honorary title bestowed each year on the most popular male--Khayat said he is personally pained by the perception of his school as intolerant and bigoted.

He is proud, he says, but not satisfied that 11.8% of the 10,300 students are black, up from 6.8% in 1990. “This is a very gentle, kind community,” he said. “I get teary talking about it.”

Despite all the sound and the fury coming from a very vocal segment opposed to change, most students do not seem to have strong feelings about “Dixie” or the rebel flag. It is not difficult to find whites who think the symbols should be done away with. “I think that if they hurt anyone, then they should be changed,” said Lisa Boihem, a senior from New Orleans.

“The flag really doesn’t mean anything to me,” said Wade Watson, a freshman from a small town in north Mississippi who said he understands why African Americans consider the flag and the song “Dixie” to be racist. He argues that the Colonel Reb mascot should be allowed to remain, though, for the sake of tradition.

John Bruce, a political science professor, said he believes that only a small number of vocal students are strongly opposed to change. They break down into two categories: those who view the symbols solely in terms of sports and school tradition and those who virulently oppose change because they see the symbols as part of white Southern heritage.

Much of the opposition, he said, comes from off campus.

Many blacks on campus are offended by the symbols but say that after a lifetime of exposure they mostly are numb to them. After all, the Mississippi state flag bears the rebel emblem, and it is visible daily above public buildings, in courtrooms and on the uniforms of law enforcement officers; and Confederate flags are on display throughout the South on bumper stickers and in convenience stores and gas stations.

“When I stop to think about what it means, I’d like them to go,” said Oshea James, a freshman from Greenville, Miss., in the Delta region. “It hurts the school.”

School officials repeatedly stress that the public relations study is designed to improve the school’s academic reputation and technically has nothing to do with Southern symbols. But if the Burson-Marsteller study, which is expected to be finished in July, finds that “Dixie” is standing in the way of progress, Khayat said the issue will be brought before faculty, students and staff to solicit their opinions on changing it.

And while he says he is not targeting the symbols, he acknowledges that the study is being conducted in large part because the school’s athletic coaches have long complained that the image makes it difficult to recruit African American athletes.

Basketball coach Rob Evans, an African American, has been particularly noteworthy in the last year not only for improving the quality of the team but also for emphasizing the need for the school to eradicate what he calls “the stigma of the Old South.”

The school officially disassociated itself from the Confederate battle flag 14 years ago when the university bookstore stopped selling it. Nevertheless, legions of students still wave the flag at football games and the band still plays “Dixie” several times during each sporting event.

But while the song may soon be on the way out, Khayat said that even he considers some traditions untouchable. “I don’t think anybody would really consider changing the name Ole Miss,” he said. “I wouldn’t change it. . . . And I think there’s plenty of room for us being the Rebels.”

The school’s stigma comes from “old TV images” from the 1960s, he said, referring to the rioting that broke out when a federal court ordered Ole Miss to admit James Meredith, it’s first African American student, in 1962. The Army restored order after 400 federal marshals clashed with 2,500 students and nonstudents opposed to integration. Two people were killed.

But not all of the ugly images are in the distant past. In 1988, as a black fraternity prepared to move into a house on campus, the building mysteriously burned to the ground in an unsolved arson. And last fall, during a football game between Ole Miss and Mississippi State University, a white former state senator and Ole Miss alumnus spewed racial slurs at a black Mississippi State player.

Publicity from the incident, which greatly embarrassed the university, was one of the reasons Khayat decided to hire the public relations firm.

In making the effort to downplay Confederate symbols, Khayat has joined the ranks of other white Southern leaders--from governors to academicians to business people--who are bucking the tide of regional opinion to try to shape a more forward-looking and less racially contentious South.

The record elsewhere has not been good. South Carolina Gov. David Beasley’s plan to remove the Confederate flag from atop the Statehouse dome went down in flames earlier this year despite support from the state’s business leaders and from blacks. Georgia Gov. Zell Miller’s proposal a few years ago to remove the Confederate emblem from the state flag engendered such a backlash that he barely won reelection. Ole Miss so far has not succeeded in getting Phi Beta Kappa, the prestigious academic honor society, to open a chapter here.

Phi Beta Kappa turned down a request for an Ole Miss chapter in 1987, saying the school needed to boost its endowment, strengthen its library and increase faculty salaries. The school is preparing to launch a $200-million fund-raising campaign next year.

“We want to be seen,” Khayat said, “in the same light as Duke, Vanderbilt, the University of Texas, the University of Michigan and the University of Illinois--schools that are well known and respected.”